The Race to the Moon in Comic Form: Ottaviani on T-Minus

By Zack Smith February 18, 2009 12:58pm ET

Jim Ottaviani on T-Minus

T-Minus

In 1969, man first set foot on the moon. In 2009, a new graphic novel will show readers what it took to get there.
Jim Ottaviani’s science-themed graphic novels have covered everything from fossils (Bone Sharps, Cowboys & Thunder Lizards) to the atomic bomb (Fallout), and now he’s taking readers all the way to the moon and back. T-Minus,
Ottaviani’s new graphic novel from Simon & Schuster, tells the
story of the 1960s space race from a perspective that’s rarely been
seen before., with art from Zander and Kevin Cannon. Ottaviani gave us
the scoop on how his story is unique from other tales of the moon
landing, and why this seminal event in human history remains important
today.
Newsarama: Jim, tell us about T-Minus.
Jim Ottaviani: Well, it’s the story of the US/USSR space race,
told in comic book form, but with a different focus from many other
books on the subject, since in addition to the astronauts and
cosmonauts and politicians and everyone else who usually gets the
limelight, this points the spotlight on the engineers and scientists on
both sides of the Iron Curtain. And that perspective is something I
don’t think you see too often in books on Apollo and Soyuz.
NRAMA: Why did you choose this unique perspective?
JO:
Well, you know me! I’m always interested in the scientists and
engineers. And there are so many books – many of them excellent – about
astronauts and cosmonauts, and relatively few about the scientists and
engineers who built their rockets and spacecraft, that I thought
shining the spotlight on these folks would be a) new to many people,
and b) kind of fun.
Maybe there’s a c) in there as well: This is aimed at a younger
audience than most of my other books. When you think about your chances
of becoming an astronaut, they’re very, very small. But being involved
in space exploration and rocket science is still possible, if you don’t
limit yourself to the goal of strapping into one of these things and
flying out of the atmosphere.
So I hope those a few of those readers will tip to the fact that there
are fascinating things to do and see and learn and take part in that
don’t involve becoming an astronaut, which, as I’ve said, is really,
really hard and unlikely for most people.
NRAMA: How did this book come about?
JO:
Planning and luck. I didn’t have to be persuaded to write something
like this – I’ve always know I would do it at some point! So the plan
part was in place. The lucky part was when my agent identified a
publisher, in this case Simon & Schuster and their Aladdin division
for young adult books, and found that they wanted a proposal for
something just like what I wanted to write. Even better, the folks at
Aladdin were relatively new at graphic novels, and the suggestion was
that we put together a team for the book and package it ourselves.

So I thought of people I’d worked with before that I wanted to work with again, and Zander and Kevin Cannon, with whom I’d done Bone Sharps, Cowboys & Thunder Lizards
were perfect. The proposal was actually not just a prose description of
the book, but also included some comic pages from the book, so Simon
& Schuster would have an idea of what the book would be like.

NRAMA: You sometimes use a variety of artists in your books, but it’s just Zander and Kevin this time, correct?
JO:
Yeah, just Zander and Kevin. They’re a pretty seamless mix – you’d be
hard-pressed to tell who did what at this point when you see the final
art. One thing Kevin does for sure is the lettering, and Zander does a
lot of figure drawing, but overall, it’s a pretty tightly-woven
braid.Beautiful.
And they’re as keen on getting the story right, and the storytelling
right, as I am so that’s beautiful too. The interior design is
integrated with the story based on some ideas by me, some by them, the
cover design is theirs, I wrote the cover copy. We got to do the
complete package – like I said, it’s a tightly woven braid.
NRAMA:
The 40th anniversary of the moon landing is coming up this summer. What
do you feel people can learn from the space program? There’s often been
a sense that we haven’t lived up to our potential when it comes to
space.
JO: Well, I think that one of the big things we
can learn and think about is that in the 1960s we made this huge push
to do something that had never been done before, we took TV cameras
along to show every step of the journey, it excited the whole world,
and then…we didn’t continue on.
Now, that’s not to say there haven’t been a lot of really interesting
things done in space since then. We’ve put hundreds and hundreds of
people up there – and we’ve sent a whole lot of robots to planets and
out into the solar system and beyond that. But a lot of the excitement
is gone – we’ve lost that, for whatever reason.
So I think the important thing to remember and learn is that we once
did these marvelous things – that we put together huge teams of people
to make the lunar landings happen, and we can solve problems that,
prior to being stated, didn’t even exist in the minds of most people.
I mean, take your average person in 1962 when Kennedy said, “We will go
to the moon by the end of this decade.” That wasn’t a shared dream at
that point, not in the US or Russia, but people got excited about it.
And they did something that most considered impossible.
We have similar, seemingly insurmountable problems today. Some of them
we’ve already been able to name. So if we look back at what we were
able to do in a fairly short time by dedicating our resources,
intellectual and financial, to a shared goal like this, I think that’s
a very hopeful thing. It gives you a feeling of, “Yeah, we could do
things like this again! We could solve some of these problems that
we’re having!”
NRAMA: What’s next for you?
JO:
Well, there are two books in the pipeline for First Second. One is a
biography of Richard Feynman, one of my physics heroes, and the other
is the story about the three most famous primate researchers: Jane
Goodall, Diane Fossey and Birute Galdikas.
Like I said, they’re in the pipeline; I’m pretty sure the Feynman
artwork is complete or almost complete, and that book will probably
come out next year, though you’d have to check with First Second about
that. The Goodall/Fossey/Galdikas book will come out the year following
that. And I’ve got a whole bunch of proposals in the pipeline, though
nothing close to finished yet.
NRAMA: Do you see yourself branching out into fiction in the future?
JO:
It’s possible! One of the proposals I have is actually a novel – it
could be a GN or a prose novel, but it’s something I’m working on to
send out to publishers. It’s also possible I’ll put it out myself
through G.T. Labs.
NRAMA: How much research do you do for one of your GNs?
JO: It’s almost impossible to answer that question. To give you an idea, let’s take a look at the full bibliography for T-Minus…[thumbs
through pages] let’s see, with annotations the full bibliography runs
eight pages. So I guess the correct answer is, “A lot!”
The space race is a nice thing to work on because it’s so
well-documented. But there’s a lot to research for any book – you want
to get a feel for the times. You want to understand the social
situation, the political situation – and have a lot of cool visuals for
your artist to draw.
For T-Minus
we wanted to be careful about anachronisms – when it comes to the space
race, there are a lot of people who are obsessive about this! I’m one
of them. So we were extremely careful about getting things right
visually. I’m sure there are some mistakes, because the story is
complex, but at least they’re not there because we couldn’t be bothered
to try and get it right!
At the same time, there were things we had to do with the book that
were not 100 percent accurate historically. For example, the total
number of people who worked on the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programs
is estimated at around 400,000 people in the US. In a 128-page book, if
you wanted to show them all you’d have to find a way to get about 3,000
people onto each page!
So you have to composite some people, to help the story move along. But
the goal is to keep the reader moving through the story, so they
understand the facts and the details regarding how things went down.

I should mention, I have 37 pages of script outtakes and scene
descriptions we couldn’t fit into the story. So maybe one day there’ll
be a director’s cut of T-Minus that will be five times as long as this version!

NRAMA: And finally – give our readers the hard sell as to why they should pick this up.
JO:
I’ll paraphrase from some of the ad copy I wrote for the book and the
Junior Library Guild, for which this book is going to be a featured
selection: Everybody always talked about the moon, but nobody ever did
anything about it. That is, until Jules Verne wrote a novel, and in
doing so did the math showing how to get there. And a Russian named
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky checked Verne’s figures and decide liquid fuel,
multi-staged rockets were the way to go. And then an American named
Robert Goddard started building and flying ‘em. And eventually, we got
there. But I haven’t seen a man on the moon since 1972. I want to see
men and women there again, and then watch them head out to Mars, and
then keep going. That’s why I wrote this book
And besides being a great adventure, we learned a lot about the moon.
Even better, we learned even more about the Earth. I don’t want to
spoil too much, but one of my favorite parts of the research was
reading the accounts of astronaut after astronaut who said something to
the effect of, “ I set out to go to the moon, but the most significant
part of my journey was looking back at the Earth on my way to the moon,
and even more so coming back.”
It really speaks to the idea of having one goal when you start a great
endeavor, and discovering another even greater one by the time you
finish. Every single astronaut – and these are hard-core, type-A,
career military men – every one became poetic when talking about looking back at the Earth.
That image of the Earth rising over the moon became the symbol of the
environmental movement, and it was taken by a bunch of test pilots
fighting to look out the window. They got caught up in the wonder of it
all.

I’d like to see something like that happen again. As cool as it is that
we have the Rovers on Mars, what I live for is the day when I see “Live
from Mars” on TV, just like I saw “Live from the Moon” 40 years ago.